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Recent documents in Department of English Publicationsen-usMon, 02 Mar 2015 01:30:41 PST3600The Grotesque Gigantic: Stephen Hero, Maximalism, and Bakhtinhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/135
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/135Sat, 28 Feb 2015 13:16:42 PSTJeremy ColangeloThe High Cost of Dancing: When the Indian Women's Movement Went After the Devadasishttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/134
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/134Fri, 26 Sep 2014 09:37:01 PDTIntroduction:

On the other side of patriarchal histories are women who are irrecoverably elusive, whose convictions and the examples their lives might have left to us--their everyday resistances as well as their capitulations to authority--are at some fundamental level lost. These are the vast majority of women who never wrote the history books that shape the manner in which we, at any particular historical juncture, are trained to remember; they did not give speeches that were recorded and carefully collected for posterity; their ideals, sayings, beliefs, and approaches to issues were not painstakingly preserved and then quoted century after century. And precisely because they so obviously lived and believed on the underside of various structures of power, probably consistently at odds with those structures, we are eager to hear their voices and their views. The problem is that their individual lives and collective ways of living them are impossible to recover in any form that has not already been altered by our own concerns. In making them speak, by whatever means we might use (archives, testimonials, court records, personal letters, government policy), we are invariably fictionalizing them because we are integrating them into narratives that belong to us, that are about us. Given the inevitability of our using them for our own purposes, we cannot justify taking that all-too-easy (and, as this essay will suggest), middle-class stance that posits us as their champions, their rescuers from history. It falls to us to find other motives for doing work that seeks them.

In the case of this essay, the "them" are the devadasis or temple dancers of what is now Tamilnadu in southern India (the term devadasis literally translates as "female servant of God"), especially those dancers who were alive during the six decades of the nationalist movement. This movement was meant to grant Indians freedom from colonial oppression and give them a nationalist identity, but if it succeeded, at least to some extent, in accomplishing these things, it did so at the cost of the devadasis and their dance traditions. Janet O'Shea (1998) explains the logic through which the newer institution, nationalism, drove out the older one, the profession and culture of the devadasis: "Indian nationalism has often required a shift away from cultural diversity in order to construct a unified image of nationhood . . . The de'rlagfns were threatening . . because they represented, for the new nation, an uncomfortable diversity of cultural practices and cultural origins" (p, 55). Most scholars who have written about the modern history of the devadasis would agree with this explanation. To the elite men and women who had the greatest say in what would constitute the new Indian nation, the devadasis were an embarrassing remnant of the pre-colonial and pre-nationalist feudal age and, as such, could not be permitted to cross over into the homogeneity that the nationalists hoped would be post-colonial India.

The campaign to suppress the devadasis and to eliminate their livelihoods culminated in the Madras Devadasis Prevention of Dedication Act of 1947, an act brought about largely through the efforts of middle-class Indian nationalists who were also social reformers and, often, feminists--that is, advocates not only of nationalism but of the burgeoning women's movement that was to ensure so many of the legal rights Indian women enjoy today.

That feminists who were determined to extend the rights of some women should also work to deny rights to other women is the conundrum that this essay examines.

While preparing to write this tribute to Dr. Balachandra Rajan, I found myself wondering what in his eminent life I should be recalling for your benefit. Which events or personal preferences, habits, gestures, or even political commitments and publications can be tallied up to create some kind of coherent narrative that conveys the gist of him? The dilemma is that, when it comes to Dr. Rajan (who in my memory can never be remembered as anyone other than Dr. Rajan, not Balachandra or Dal, as he was known by his friends here), the details I could cobble together to create the gist that he was to me arc, I expect, different from what others might gather, others who have also known him, respected him, and loved him, as I did, and who, like me, found their lives changed by him. I suspect that his colleagues in Milton scholarship and in his department at the University of Western Ontario are better able to describe his public side: his many professional achievements, for instance, and all his theoretically diverse and numerous publications. It seems to me that, because I spent so much time apparently idly talking with Dr. Rajan in the last twenty years or so, mostly about his life and the people whose lives mattered to him and about India, a country that partially defined him and also often annoyed him and the fascination for which brought us together initially and then many, many times afterward it would make sense for me to linger awhile over the decisions he made that brought him, finally, to London, Ontario, Canada. The man who impressed me was somewhere in those decisions.

In 1947, after over 50 years of agitation and political pressure on the part of a committed group of Hindu reformers, the Madras legislature passed an act into law that would change forever the unique culture of the professional female temple dancers of South India. It was called the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act. Despite having the wholehearted support of the Indian women’s movement of the time, the Act represented the imposition of androcentric values on a matrifocal and matrilineal tradition, a tradition which had for centuries managed to withstand the compulsions of Hindu patriarchy. The devadasis were eventually forced to give up their profession and their unusual way of life. But the dance itself was not lost. It was, instead, reconstructed as a national treasure. One of the consequences of the 1947 Act is that, today in India and all over the world, the temple dance, once exclusively performed by devadasis, is dominated by women of the upper castes.

What I intend to do in the following pages is to explore the much suppressed history of the devadasis through a reading of R.K. Narayan’s novel The Man-Eater of Malgudi. It might seem strange to readers that I should press this wonderfully funny book into the service of my historical rescue because it is generally interpreted as a story about two male characters, Nataraj and Vasu. These characters are frequently understood as antagonists, with Nataraj symbolizing the harmony that Narayan is supposed to prefer and Vasu the chaos he apparently dislikes. There are alternative explanations.

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Teresa HubelWhose India?: The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and Historyhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/131
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/131Tue, 05 Aug 2014 10:21:48 PDT
For centuries, India has captured our imagination. Far more than a mere geographical presence, India is also an imaginative construct shaped by competing cultures, emotions, and ideologies. In Whose India? Teresa Hubel examines literary and historical texts by the British and Indian writers who gave meaning to the construct “India” during the final decades of the Empire. Feminist and postcolonial in its approach, this work describes the contest between British imperialists and Indian nationalists at that historical moment when India sought to achieve its independence; that is, when the definition, acquisition, and ownership of India was most vehemently at stake.Hubel collapses the boundary between literature and history by emphasizing the selected nature of the “facts” that comprise historical texts, and by demonstrating the historicity of fiction. In analyzing the orthodox construction of the British/Indian encounter, Hubel calls into question assumptions about the end of nationalism implicit in mainstream histories and fiction, which generally describe a battleground on which only ruling-class Indians and British meet. Marginalized texts by women, untouchables, and overt imperialists alike are, therefore, examined alongside the well-known work of figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Jawaharlal Nehru, E. M. Forster, and Mahatma Gandhi. In Whose India? discursive ownership and resistance to ownership are mutually constructing categories. As a result, the account of Indian nationalism and British imperialism that emerges is much more complicated, multivocal, and even more contradictory than previous studies have imagined. Of interest to students and scholars engaged in literary, historical, colonial/postcolonial, subaltern, and Indian studies, Whose India? will also attract readers concerned with gender issues and the canonization of texts.
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Teresa HubelCharting the Anger of Indian Women through Narayan's Savitrihttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/130
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/130Thu, 01 May 2014 07:07:17 PDTFrom the introduction:

Written in the late 1930s, when a new irascibility crept into the largely female-produced discourse on the status of women in India, The Dark Room is about a particular woman's indignation and revolt. Savitri is a Hindu wife following in the glorified footsteps of other Hindu wives, such as her namesake from the Mahabharata and Sita of the Ramayana. Although she lives up to the ideals of servitude and devotion implicit in these powerful feminine figures, Savitri of The Dark Room is betrayed by a patriarchal system that allows her husband the freedom of infidelity but denies her the right to economic independence. At the close of the story she finds herself trapped in a marriage that she cannot end and that she can barely alter. But Savitri does rebel, though her rebellion is enormously circumscribed by her gendered helplessness. That Narayan documents her rebellion as well as her helplessness and, significantly, refuses to close on the endnote of tranquillity and detachment that characterizes most of his novels (the two qualities that Western literary scholars like best to celebrate In his work) makes The Dark Room a radical exception.

What I am going to argue in the pages that follow is that The Dark Room not only reveals the traces of the 1930s women's movement in India in its intersections with Indian nationalism of the time, but also that these traces ground the novel in ways that resist the discourse of timelessness that we have come to expect in Narayan's work. Understood within its historical context, this novel is a testament to a particular kind of female loneliness and loss. Outside of that very timely arena, The Dark Room can look like an aberration and feel like a disappointment, though neither of these responses does justice to its powerful message. Before we can explicate that message, we need first to acknowledge and explore the political circumstances that middle and upper class Indian women confronted in the period surrounding the production of this novel.

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Teresa HubelA Mutiny of Silence: Swarnakumari Devi's Satihttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/129
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/129Wed, 19 Feb 2014 09:02:38 PSTAim:To discuss how Swarnakumari Devi's family connections as much as her sex contributed to why her work faded from the memory of nationalist India.

Introduction:

The historical context that helped to produce the writing of Swarna-kumari Devi Ghosal also gives us a glimmer into some of the possible reasons why her work faded from the literary memory of nationalist India. Some of that context is hinted at in the back pages of her collection of short stories in English, published in 1919 by Ganesh and Co., Madras. Reminding us of the inescapable connection between capitalism and knowledge, these back pages are dedicated to an advertisement of Ganesh and Co.'s other recently published texts. Grouped under the heading "Indian National Literature," their titles and descriptions are telling: The Indian Nation Builders, a series of biographies of "thirty-six eminent Indians"; India for Indians, which contains speeches delivered by C. R. Das on the subject of Home Rule; How India Can Save the Empire, another compilation of speeches, these by the members of the Indian Home Rule Deputation and other unnamed leaders, who, Indian readers are promised, will explicate "the Present Situation and the future work before us" (3); Is India Civilized?: Essays on Indian Culture by Sir John WoodrofFe; and almost in answer to that titanically insulting question, Art and Swadeshi by Dr. A. K. Coomaraswamy. That same list of Indian National Literature announces the arrival on the political and literary scene of Swarnakumari Devis unpretentiously entitled Short Stories.

Unlike the historical indeterminacy of Swarnakumari Devi's modest title, the names of these other texts date them much more precisely. This is the early twentieth century in British imperial India, the second decade of that century, in fact, a time when the givenness of the empire--with its pretensions to being the definer of what was or was not "civilized"--was clashing with a relatively new nationalist ideology that had not quite yet found one dominant way. It was the age of Home Rule, of Swadeshi, of Hindu revivalism, violence in Bengal, and the temporary break-up of the National Congress; it was the after-Tilak-and-before-Gandhi moment in Indian history, in short, a liminal age, which might have gone in any one of a number of directions. What I will argue in this essay is that Swarnakumari Devi's almost forgotten collection of short stories in English, and particularly the last story, "Mutiny," not only manifests the restlessness and indecisiveness of that era but contributed to the creation of the next--the Gandhian one. In so doing, I aim to be part of a still exclusive but growingly public conversation about this neglected author whose family connections as much as her sex got in the way of her posterity.

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Teresa HubelIn Search of the British Indian in British India: White Orphans, Kipling’s Kim, and Class in Colonial Indiahttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/128
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/128Thu, 30 Jan 2014 11:12:26 PSTIntroduction:

Contemporary scholars struggling to keep their work politically meaningful and efficacious often, with the best of intentions, invoke the triad of race, gender and class. But though this three-part mantra is persistently and even passionately recited, usually in the introductory paragraphs of a scholarly piece, ‘attentive listening,’ as historian Douglas M. Peers asserts, ‘reveals that class is sounded with little more than a whisper’ (825). Unlike the other two, class largely remains an under-explored and, consequently, little understood category of experience and inquiry. I can say with certainty that this is true in my own field of postcolonial studies, with its sub-discipline of colonial discourse analysis. In part because of the politically justifiable emphasis on race in postcolonial research and theory (and only later, through feminist insistence, was that emphasis broadened to include gender), we have yet to develop as sustained, various, and subtle a critique of class as that which now exists for race and gender.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that the term “postfeminism” is often and perhaps most frequently used—by the mainstream media generally and by actual people—as a kind of casual dismissal of feminism that comes implicitly coupled with the suggestion that the cutting-edge place to be these days, with regard to women, is the one where the old victim mentality has been sloughed off and a new flying-free-of-those-chains approach to gender in all its diversity and in all its equal opportunity has been boldly embraced. Given the terms of this unstated argument, any criticism of this postfeminism automatically slots the critic into the role of the relic, the leftover women’s libber still fighting battles that no longer need to be fought. And who among us, standing in front of our students or our colleagues, wants to be seen to be so pathetically tilting at windmills? Only the bravest. Or the least self-conscious. Because this form of postfeminism works to keep women quiet about their structural complaints and teaches them to interpret those complaints as being of individual rather than collective origin, it works as another new face of patriarchy.

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Teresa HubelStill Here: Choreography, Temporality, AIDShttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/126
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/126Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:50:01 PSTSteven BruhmAll is True (Henry VIII): The Unbearable Sex of Henry VIIIhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/125
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/125Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:47:20 PSTSteven BruhmCell Phones from Hellhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/124
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/124Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:17:45 PST
Recently Hollywood has remade a number of movies from the 1970s, movies in which young women are terrorized by a murderer calling from a telephone located elsewhere in the house. In the remakes, the murderer uses a cell phone, which effectively destroys the sense of space and distance on which earlier horror films were predicated. In one way, these films gesture to Jean Baudrillard's idea of “the transparency of evil,” in that they depict the collapse between the speaking self and the technologies of monstrosity against which the self might be defined. In another way, though, the films proliferate sites of desire from which the telephonic subject searches for connection, even if that connection is impossible to establish. This essay reads the original and the remade When a Stranger Calls and Black Christmas through Baudrillard and Georges Bataille. Ultimately, it finds in contemporary telephonic horror a complex deracination of the desiring subject from its own speaking self.
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Steven BruhmReal Money and Romanticismhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/123
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/123Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:36:42 PDT
"Real Money and Romanticism interprets poetry and fiction by Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Charles Dickens in the context of changes in the British monetary system and in the broader economy during the early nineteenth century. In this period modern systems of paper money and intellectual property became established; Matthew Rowlinson describes the consequent changes in relations between writers and publishers and shows how a new conception of material artefacts as the bearers of abstract value shaped Romantic conceptions of character, material culture, and labor. A fresh and radically different contribution to the growing field of inquiry into the 'economics' of literature, this is an ingenious and challenging reading of Romantic discourse from the point of view of monetary theory and history." (From online book description)
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Matthew RowlinsonJohn McGahern and the Art of Memoryhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/122
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/122Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:28:52 PDT
"In 2005, when John McGahern published his Memoir, herevealed for the first time in explicit detail the specific nature of the autobiographical dimension of his fiction, a dimension he had hitherto either denied or mystified. Taking Memoir as a paradigmatic work of memory, confession, and imaginative recovery, this book is a close reading of McGahern's novels that discovers his narrative poiesis in both the fiction and the memoir to be a single, continuous, and coherent mythopoeic project concealed within the career of a novelist writing ostensibly in the realist tradition of modern Irish fiction. McGahern's total body of work centres around the experiences of loss, memory, and imaginative recovery. To read his fiction as an art of memory is to recognize how he used story-telling to confront the extended grief and anger that blighted his early life and that shaped his sense of self and world. It is also to understand how he gradually, painfully and honestly wrote his way out of the darkness and despair of the early work into the luminous celebration of life and the world in his great last novel That They May Face the Rising Sun." (From online book synopsis)
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Dermot McCarthy<em>Ulysses</em> in Focus: Genetic, Textual, and Personal Viewshttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/121
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/121Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:21:44 PDT
"Bringing together twelve essays in three areas of Joyce criticism and scholarship, this refreshing book offers various personal adventures from a life lived with Joyce’s work. In a manner that is at once modest, rigorous, and accessible, Ulysses in Focus engagingly connects these scholarly developments and contretemps to the author's personal history and provides fascinating new genetic readings of several episodes of Ulysses that advance our understanding of the novel’s composition." (From online book description)
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Michael GrodenÓttarr svartihttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/120
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/120Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:38 PDTRussell PooleLiðsmannaflokkrhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/119
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/119Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:36 PDTRussell PooleLausavísurhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/118
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/118Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:33 PDTRussell PooleGunnlaugr ormstungahttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/117
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/117Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:30 PDTRussell PooleDarraðarljóðhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/116
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/englishpub/116Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:28 PDTRussell Poole